Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

Friday, December 13, 2013

The Denver Post
Colorado prison
wardens can no longer send prisoners with major mental illness to
solitary confinement, according to a memo distributed Thursday that
solidifies state policy years in the making.
The numbers of
mentally ill prisoners locked in cells alone for 23 hours each day has
steadily dropped this fall: from 40 in September to fewer than 30 in
November and now to just eight. The state wants the number at zero by
the end of the year.
The memo from interim director of prisons Lou
Archuleta to prison wardens said that "going forward," staff members
must not send prisoners with major mental illness to solitary
confinement, also called administrative segregation.
"This is an
enormous foundational step toward getting seriously mentally ill
prisoners out of solitary confinement and into treatment," said Rebecca
Wallace, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of
Colorado.
The Colorado Department of Corrections opened a
residential treatment program for mentally ill prisoners at Centennial
Correctional Facility in Cañon City in January, shutting down a prior
program that treated mentally ill prisoners while they were held in
solitary confinement.
But progress stalled when, two months
later, corrections executive director Tom Clements was shot to death on
his doorstep. The suspect: a parolee released directly from solitary
confinement to the streets who was later killed by Texas deputies.
"We
were moving along, and Tom was killed. We were at a standstill," said
Kellie Wasko, the department's deputy executive director. After months
with an interim executive director, and then the hiring of new director
Rick Raemisch, "it was time to pick it back up and move on."
Since
this fall, the state has moved about 55 mentally ill prisoners into the
residential treatment program. The 240-bed program had about 160
prisoners in September and now has about 215.

"As you know, we, as a department have been working to
move all of our offenders housed in administrative segregations with
major mental illness out of ad seg," the memo said.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

DOC is lying again. Colorado State Prison is an ALL AD SEG prison. The worst of the worst, murderers and violent gangs are all put in CSP. There is one inmate who talks all day and all night and bothers other inmates with his conduct. It makes it a pure hell to be locked up next to this mentally ill murderer.